October 16, 2011

Glorified Map Drill

Last week we skipped doing map drill due to important interruptions. However that led us to something even better this week. In an attempt to save the map drill lesson I ended up incorporating it into a project we were doing with some info from our reading this week We are reading from The Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt. In the end we came up with a cool looking map flip book.

The info we needed to incorporate into some form of project was this:

• The three kingdoms of Ancient Egypt: upper, middle and lower Egypt. (we also included Nubia for fun)

• The names of the three kings: The hawk king, The reed, king and the bee king.

• The hats worn by the three different kings: The red hat for the lower kingdom, the white hat for the middle kingdom and the two hats in one for the upper which dominated and became the hat of the two lands.

• Lastly the items on our map from map drill. We got carried away and added all four cataracts, and the Mediterranean sea. We usually only add one item each week. But why not add more, it was fun!

I put together the flip book on my own ahead of time just to get my own mind around the lesson. But when I introduced the lesson I gave the boys only the info. We then discussed how we could somehow turn that info into a project. We discussed different things we could do to explain or show this information visually. The lesson flopped a bit because they were not as enthusiastic about the info from our book as I was, which made them less enthusiastic about doing a project with it. This often happens in life. Each person in reading a passage from any good book will get different things out of the passage depending on who they are, what they already know etc. So, even though they were not excited like I was by the info when we read it, I thought it was still a worth while endeavor to continue on with a project idea. By doing this they are getting a chance to see how it can be done and will most likely begin thinking of their own projects as we read along in our book of the pharaohs and I will be waiting in the wings, ready to see that project come to life. In the future I am hoping and praying to see their ideas, not mine made into projects. But for now I don't mind teaching them to dance by letting them stand upon my shoes. So we danced to my footsteps this time and it turned out quite nice. The bys did an great job, and learned more about the three kings, the lay of the land according to the kingdoms and what was really a new idea for them was that lower Egypt was at the top of our map. I hope in the future, to do a salt dough map of Egypt so they can see why the lower Egypt is really lower and upper Egypt is really upper due to the muntains in Nubia.

In the end after talking about the info and the project ideas, they liked my idea best. So we embarked on the adventure of making it.

• First we cut covers to match the maps. Then we decorated the cover with an old style map and the title.

Next we cut the bottoms off three of the four maps we had. One map was for lower Egypt, one for middle Egypt, one for upper Egypt and one for Nubia. This is the same map we use for our map drill so we already know it quite well. Each map was printed on a different color paper so it would be easy to see where one kingdom stopped and another began.

Next we stapled all the maps and the cover together so the map tiers would fall into the correct position.

Next we colored and cut out the three kings and placed them on the correct kingdom where they were known to have ruled.

and lastly we did our map drill and added features to the map(s) and colored it in.

Max's map, Zak's map and T.J.'s map in that order.

This Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt map flip book can be downloaded here for free. Enjoy!

Yes, it is still available...I clicked on the text in the last sentence "download here" it took me to HS share and it downloaded for me. So try again, I am not sure why it is not working on your end. Good luck!